Slack Acquires Screenhero (YC W13)

http://techcrunch.com/2015/01/28/slack-buys-screenhero-to-add-screen-sharing-and-voice-chat-to-its-work-messaging-platform/

by pallian • 11 years ago

284 74 11 years ago

techcrunch.com

slantyyz2• 11 years ago

My business partner and I have been using Slack as our primary messaging tool and been somewhat stuck with Skype as a secondary tool for voice and screen sharing. I am definitely interested in seeing where this goes, and it's definitely a feature we'd pay for.

jnettome• 11 years ago

I'm totally agree with you. Same here.

socialist_coder2• 11 years ago

You could have paid for Screenhero before. Maybe if more people did, they wouldn't have sold to Slack.

We used Screenhero when it was free. It is better than Skype. But, it's not really worth the price when Skype is free.

slantyyz2• 11 years ago

To be more clear, I'm actually hoping that it becomes a tightly integrated feature within Slack vs. using it as a separate service.

imrank1• 11 years ago

I used Screenhero a lot when I worked remotely. It's a great tool. Shared screens from the East coastto West coast (US) with hardly ever experiencing problems. Great service.

jsherwani6• 11 years ago

(Screenhero co-founder here) I'm very glad to hear this! Your screen sharing (and voice and video communication) experience is going to get even better in the coming months. Stay tuned :)

kendallpark• 11 years ago

I am extremely excited about this.

Pair Programming++

orthecreedence• 11 years ago

It's a Slacquisition ha ha.

Been using Slack a lot the past few months and really love it. Pairing it with Trello has given us a powerhouse of open communication and task management. I'm interested to see how it scales for our team as we grow, although the way Slack sets up channels I think it won't be a problem.

It will be interesting to see the screen sharing stuff too. Maybe it could replace Skype, which I cringe whenever I have to open (slow desktop app + tons of ads + incessantly begs me to update almost every time I open it).

hammerdr2• 11 years ago

This saddens and frustrates me as a user. I love screenhero and it does its job well. I've used it for all of my remote interactions over the past year or so and was a happy paying customer (through our company).

Unfortunately, due to other concerns about paying for Slack[1], we probably will not be able to continue to use it. We'll be a once-happy customer that falls victim to this acquisition. It leaves a bad taste in my mouth :(

[1] It is expensive especially at our scale, we already pay for a couple chatroom-type/irc-like services, and the big one: long-lasting offsite chat logs present a difficult hurdle in client negotiations, a headache we just do not need

wallflower• 11 years ago

Slack has a feature where you can auto-expire chat channel logs. However, I have a feeling that may not good enough for your client's/industry compliance standards?

https://slack.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/203457187-Settin...

fidotron3• 11 years ago

Post Sony Pictures a lot of companies have become super wary of it.

I know a good number of high profile companies (including in the HN sense) that won't let you conduct dealings with them via any cloud service. Potential clients/partners really do ask what email service you're using quite early these days, the only universally acceptable answer is self hosted (either Exchange or something else), which strikes me as crazy considering how difficult to do properly that is, but there we are.

jsherwani6• 11 years ago

I'm one of the co-founders of Screenhero. I'm really sorry that you won't be able to continue to use Screenhero. This isn't just PR/marketing-speak, as someone who has spent many years of his life working on this product (that I love), it really does pain me to know that someone who also loved what we'd built will no longer be able to use it.

However, in the grand scheme of things, I (and our team) feels that this is the best step forward for everyone involved (including Screenhero users). Slack is on its way towards becoming the de facto communication tool used by teams (both big and small), and an integrated Screenhero + Slack product just makes the most sense for the most people.

I would love to learn more about why your team can't use Slack, and what we can do to mitigate the issues you've outlined and others that you may not have outlined yet. Please feel free to add me to Screenhero (j at slack-corp.com) and let's have a deeper conversation about this, if you're open to it.

dharma1• 11 years ago

We use slack (distributed team), and I was thinking of starting to use Screenhero.

When can we get Screenhero features in Slack? Any beta testers required? :)

hammerdr2• 11 years ago

We actually use slack (and hipchat, and jive, and whatsapp, and groupme, and skype, and who-knows-what-else.. ugh) for communications that we would consider sanitized for public consumption (so, no discussion about client IP, for example). The only approved chatroom/im tool that we use is GChat, though. The reason for that is that our internal team is comfortable with Google Apps as a (relatively) secure platform for communication.

They also approved of screenhero (I can guess why, but it would be a guess).

They have not approved of slack, hipchat, etc. for client-related communications because they are nervous about having that much liability not under our control. It also makes it difficult for our contracts team that would then be required to explain that client data could now be in either Google Apps or Slack.

I would say that these decisions are going to be SOP for a consultancy of a certain size.

I don't necessary agree with all of these decisions, but I understand and try to empathize with the other parties that would be inconvenienced.

Edit:

I think what happened is that screenhero got a verbal and passionate following within our consultancy that the decision to use screenhero was 'encouraged' into being adopted. We started using it under-the-radar when it was free and when it became paid, the organization realized how many people were using it successfully. It was a ground up effort.

It makes me sad that a tool we found so useful across our organization (which you can see above is incredibly fragmented) is being made inaccessible. I know you're trying to do right by your users and we're just a weird edge case, so no bad feelings. Just wish it were not so :(

fennecfoxen• 11 years ago

I'm one of the co-founders of Screenhero. I'm really sorry that you won't be able to continue to use Screenhero.

You know what you need to do, to keep these teams happy? You need to continue have a minimal tool that does the thing that people need -- screen sharing -- and does it well, instead of bludgeoning them with a massive general-purpose communications suite that they don't want, which is essentially what you were just cheering about in your recent email.

I'm sure you'll make more money this way, but you needn't expect the people you're abandoning to be happy.

staunch• 11 years ago

Slack is on its way towards becoming the de facto communication tool used by teams...

Silicon Valley hubris. Slack rose quickly and it can fall just as quickly. Being anointed by Silicon Valley doesn't make real success a foregone conclusion.

danudey• 11 years ago

The issue I have with Slack is that the one thing I want to pay for is more integrations, but in order to do that I need to shell out $7/mo/user, and doing ten integrations instead of five isn't worth $350/mo. As a result, we just straight up aren't using most of what Slack is great at, and we probably never will.

If they offered a paid tier for just extending the number of integrations available, I think it would quickly become far more useful to my team, but none of the rest of the paid features are of any use to any of the teams I'm on at all. I get that I'm probably not the target market, but I would wager that whatever those two extra integrations would cost them to provide us, our team would be able to pay and then some.

droopyEyelids• 11 years ago

This would be the sweetest pricing structure for a billion uses like a friend-group Slack, a slack for your open source project, a slack for gaming clans, a slack for your minecraft server, a slack for small non-profits or small businesses, a slack for families.

Right now, the free tier only gets you basically an isolated version of every other free messaging service around. If you could pay $8/month for each additional integration, small slacks would go from being an {inconvenience OR huge bill} to something everyone with technical ability could use to integrate a million different signals with the people they care about.

I really, really hope slack lets us pay per integration someday.

aagha2• 11 years ago

What's the benefit of using solutions like Slack when there's free (unlimited users/groups/etc.) solutions like Kato.im?

Killswitch2• 11 years ago

Been a long time user of Slack and absolutely love it... I've seriously got a bromance with this company. It's adored throughout the company I work at, and one of our pains is that we do all our communication through Slack, even if we're next to each other, we still have headphones on and we talk in Slack. But we still have to go to Skype to do stand up meetings with our remote users... Would be so much better if we could do video over Slack.

jsherwani6• 11 years ago

Give us a few months...

Killswitch2• 11 years ago

I'm patiently waiting. Keep up the awesome work.

adieth• 11 years ago

We tested Slack some months ago, but rejected it due to lack of solution for VoIP and video conference.

I am not seeing this acquisition is changing this. In order to have a meeting with multiple participants, we will still need Skype/Hangouts/Lync/WebEx.

sciurus• 11 years ago

What are you using instead?

joelandren• 11 years ago

Our team has been using the Google Hangouts integration for months and it's worked flawlessly.

jacques_chester• 11 years ago

Hangouts has a maximum number of participants. For large phone conferences it's not usable.

bradenb• 11 years ago

Our entire company uses Slack for most communication since everyone works 100% remotely. It has been fantastic. Finding a good tool for screen sharing has been difficult, though. I pair almost every day, so I need a tool that is stable and has a good quality-to-speed ratio.

For people with good connections, Screenhero works well; only downsides are that we get a lot of crashes in the beta app and sometimes the mouse sharing changes window focus or mouse position for the other user, but in general it is the best tool we've found. For those without good connections, we have to use GoTo since it sacrifices refresh rates for quality.

Overall, I'm excited to see how this works out. Right now it's a small subset of people in our company that use Screenhero, but I expect to see that number jump with this announcement.

nikhilpandit• 11 years ago

I used screenhero for some remote work. It's great for pair programming and helping debug a problem remotely. Since our team used Slack, I really wished Slack would add similar functionality to their product. Glad to see that it's going to happen now, and will be built by the people who built the awesome screehero product. Congrats guys! hope to see more awesome work from you!

jsherwani6• 11 years ago

Thanks! We are looking forward to doing more awesome for you :)

agentultra• 11 years ago

Screenhero has been amazing for pairing remotely; something I do often. A co-worker was amazed when his custom keyboard layout worked seamlessly with my terminal session. Once people experience it I find it's not hard to convert them. It will be interesting to see how the Slack integration will improve the experience.

One thing I've always wanted though was integration between Screenhero and Sqwiggle. Any chance we'll see something like that, Slack?

dnfriedman• 11 years ago

We're big users of both Slack + Screenhero at Thinkful for our students communicating with each other in real time (Slack) and pair programming with mentors (Screenhero). We were even spec'ing a feature to make Screenhero the only tool for mentor sessions. Congrats to the Screenhero team – you built a great product and deserve this, but it's sad we'll have to switch to another product. We can't wait months to have something available, and it's not clear the new features will do what we need :/

Grae• 11 years ago

Yeah, congrats to both teams. I agree wholeheartedly with Dan's comment; I love each of your products separately and look forward to playing with the integration down the road, but I'm disappointed to lose the existing Screenhero now.

cvburgess• 11 years ago

according to @tptacek, you might be fine:

There already is a Screenhero integration for Slack. If you pay for Slack, you can set it up in like 3 minutes, from slack.com/screenhero.

robertwalsh0• 11 years ago

As a screenhero and Slack user I'm excited to be able to experience one experience across both products. They're both best in class in my opinion.

lbotos• 11 years ago

Screenhero reps, do you have a gameplan for being able to "invite" users for one time sessions? This is what I often need Screenhero for.

Anjin• 11 years ago

This would be amazing. I use Screenhero all the time for work, but every so often I need to help my mother with something on her computer and there is no free solution available that is better than Screenhero.

I'm just not going to pay for another subscription just to help my mother out with tech support once a quarter...

digitalbase• 11 years ago

i am sure they will think about this. Plus slack is working on public channels which would be a workaround for one time users.

cobychapple• 11 years ago

Blog post from Screenhero: http://blog.screenhero.com/post/109337923751/screenhero-join...

Thread on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8961845

wamatt• 11 years ago

As a user of both Slack and Screenhero this makes me happy.

I've always felt they would make a cute couple. That said, integration seemed kind of sparse (limited to /username in Slack). We also struggled to have it work reliably in daily use.

Thus we mostly reverted back to the Skype/Slack combo. However this has proved to be suboptimal, partly because links and chatlogs shared in Skype are not archived in Slack for easy retrieval.

Hopefully this marriage will bring about a bunch of deeper and more polished integrations for users.

jsherwani6• 11 years ago

(Co-founder of Screenhero here) Thanks! We do think we look good together ;)

A great integration is exactly what we want to make happen. Stay tuned for awesomeness in the coming months! We are super excited to make something that you will love.

e0m• 11 years ago

What does this mean for Sqwiggle? Are you guys the next Slack acquisition?

porter• 11 years ago

is there anything else out there that I can pay for now that's like screenhero? This actually looks like something I need, but now I can't sign up.

ringmaster• 11 years ago

I have to agree with the frustration of the apparent minority. We've been using HipChat corporate-wide, and the subset of users that have been using Screenhero aren't going to be able to change to Slack now (even if we wanted to).

And it seems that the wondering our remote development team has been doing about what happened to progress on Screenhero's video codec (pumping 800kb/s+ over my line when nothing is happening on screen is a bit excessive) is now answered with a resounding, "We've been trying to get acquired." Well, congrats on that.

Back to VNC and Skype with no cursor of my own, I guess. But at least it's free and has less chance of my ISP throttling my home connection due to saturating the pipes with Screenhero all day.

StevenKW• 11 years ago

So if I am an unpaid slack user how do I screenshare with a user that is not a slack user?

If I am an unpaid member of several unpaid slack teams how do I continue to use screenhero?

Can I opt in to a paid single user and use screenhero across my multiple slack teams?

q3k• 11 years ago

Cross platform: Screenhero supports both Windows and Mac.

It's like there isn't any other operating system...

We do both, country AND western!

shenoyroopesh• 11 years ago

As a slack user, I think this is awesome. This is one thing that we do miss currently, a video calling facility.

I mean we can log into skype or google hangouts something else, but having it in slack would be totally cool!

I've never used Screenhero before, but going by the comments here, I wish I had!

Slack Acquires Screenhero (YC W13)

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